DevOps
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DevOps Practices

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development and IT operations to shorten the development lifecycle while delivering features, fixes, and updates frequently and reliably.

The DevOps Philosophy

DevOps emerged from the frustration of siloed development and operations teams. Developers would write code, throw it over the wall to operations, and hope for the best. DevOps breaks down these silos by fostering a culture of shared responsibility for the entire software lifecycle.

Core Practices

  • Continuous Integration — merge and test code changes frequently
  • Continuous Delivery — keep code always ready for production deployment
  • Infrastructure as Code — manage infrastructure through version-controlled configuration
  • Monitoring and Observability — understand system behavior through metrics, logs, and traces
  • Incident Response — structured processes for detecting, responding to, and learning from failures

DevOps Metrics

The DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics provide a framework for measuring DevOps performance:

  • Deployment frequency — how often code reaches production
  • Lead time for changes — time from commit to production
  • Mean time to recovery — how quickly teams recover from failures
  • Change failure rate — percentage of deployments causing incidents

DevOps at Scale

As organizations grow, DevOps practices need supporting infrastructure. This is where platform engineering comes in—building internal tools and platforms that make it easy for every team to follow DevOps best practices without becoming infrastructure experts.

Related Terms

CI/CDGitOpsPlatform EngineeringDevSecOps

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